


Hallucination

by Chlokers



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Implied/Referenced Drug Use, M/M, Victorian Sherlock Holmes/John Watson
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-19
Updated: 2020-04-19
Packaged: 2021-03-02 03:40:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,453
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23738479
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chlokers/pseuds/Chlokers
Summary: Not native speaker, and frankly had just started reading the Doyle canon a week ago, so feel free to point any mistakes.
Relationships: Mycroft Holmes & Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock Holmes & John Watson, Sherlock Holmes/John Watson
Kudos: 11





	Hallucination

**Author's Note:**

  * A translation of [hallucination](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23735893) by [Saintmephisto](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Saintmephisto/pseuds/Saintmephisto). 



> Not native speaker, and frankly had just started reading the Doyle canon a week ago, so feel free to point any mistakes.

If life had really favoured me, it would have at least prevented me from picking up those vice habits in my early twenties. It was the Christmas of 1878, as I remember, when my detective career had just started to take off. The rent of Montague Street had once stringed my finances, but now, finally free from worries of settlement, I decided I could at least grant myself a little celebration. I was thinking, then, about where I could find a chemist who had the product I wanted.

I had my wish fulfilled. I injected the long-desired cocaine and then stood at the window playing violin, a piece composed by myself. I remembered it clearly as a duet, or rather, I imagined it to be. Honestly, I was more proficient with solos, but at a junior age I was devoted to any kind of trivial rivalry between me and Mycroft. A duet was, for me, war in an underdeveloped form. I endeavoured to challenge my brother's technique with glittering cadenzas for his part, and he was willing to kindly accept my challenge as a condescending old gentleman. Just as all firstborns of his generation, my brother had matured and aged too early and never bothered to move against me, as if I was the only child of this pathetic family. My only relation to the world was so curious that I did not care so much when at a certain point our childhood intimacy stretched into tacit distance. We were like two sides of one coin, me and my brother, just coincidentally sharing the same disposition of isolation and apathy. He had found himself a boring post in the government when I moved to Montague Street to start a life of myself.

The street was extremely crowded that evening, and for several times I looked down from the window, feeling adrift in the endless current of life. The tremendous noise made by the dark silhouettes and their vehicles drove at my brain, and my bow cut into the strings, a defence from the eternal, jarring screams--always in the treble only. I had been adept in playing in the treble since childhood, quite skilled at conducting those extravagant and springy notes, while the missing counterpoint was kept in the loft of my memory. Speaking of the loft, it was more decent than the flat I was then living in, with a chair in the place Mycroft had been. I sat on its left, and played to the void. Sometimes the chair was occupied by my clients, of various types, people I had closely observed and deduced during surveillance, people who were wanted on the walls of my workshop, thugs put to justice, victims at the crime scene. They sat straight and in silence, and I, though perplexed at their arrivals, had no complaint, because I knew my brain would soon forget these randomly picked faces and the chair would return to its normal state of emptiness.

I could have spent the hours in a trance under the effect of drugs, exhausted yet satisfied, until the sunbeam drew along with the shadow from the extremity of endless London streets. Thinking back, I probably had taken too much cocaine, considering the shocking speed in which my heartbeat was accelerating, gradually surpassing my body. Frustrated, I found myself in a miserable state of my own making, my right arm shaking with every finger having acquired its own volition. The air around me floated in vaporization, circulating in the whole room, a spectacle which I thought would be the perfect source of hallucination if someday for a case I would have to fake deliration: I would describe in vivid details the circulation of the atmosphere, the eruption of submarine volcanos, or merely the infinite proliferation of oysters. When I at last came to myself, the world had subsided as sediments would under water, and everything was as calm and clear as Bach's D minor. I put the violin back in its case and turned. In that exact moment, I saw the figure sitting in my empty chair.

He wasn't any of those I had seen, I dare say. The moonlight shone through him and landed on me, outlining his gaunt contour. I presumed his military history, cut short out of injury. I would declare the wound in the shoulder, undoubtedly, bur for the dim light in the night which distorted my senses and hence my conclusion.

He sat in the chair which somehow seemed exactly made for him and watched me in an equally thoughtful manner.

I was used to people popping up unexpectedly in my Memory Loft as well as their usual silence, so I just raised myself up a little, crossed my hands in front of my chest, and observed. The fire crackled in the hearth; a sound that was strangely reassuring provided this bizarre scene.

Introduce yourself now, I demanded silently.

"John Hamish Watson." He replied abruptly. It took me a moment to realize no, he wasn't replying me--more like a melancholic, unanswered soliloquy. His eyes were still on me, candid, not expecting any response. I was unsure if he was just looking at an imagined character. The idea was ridiculous, for his presence was clearly an effect of hallucination to me as well.

"My name's John Hamish Watson." He said, word by word, when I noticed a notebook opened flat on his lap, a pen lying on the pages. He sounded like he was merely thinking aloud. His words were illogical, same phrases repeated in distortion. His face showed morbid emaciation, his eyes low and lost. "John Hamish Watson is my name. I have a bull-terrier...I served in Afghanistan. I now live in London."

He looked like a fugue patient, or a foreigner who had just for the first time stepped into the English world. I looked at him, mind reeling: his complexion was reddened out of service in the tropics. The knuckles stiff on his legs were coarse, the site of callus proved his position as a fusilier. His palm was dry and desquamated, the result of consistent disinfection by alcohol—also a doctor, then. A patient of serious insomnia. He had no friend in London, because he sounded like he hadn't talked for three days.

He spoke several more words, too vague to hear, and his head drooped, his hands on the front. He had fair hair. I saw that he was actually looking at his script--he was writing.

So I stood up, and walked to him.

"Sherlock Holmes." He said suddenly. I was automatically alerted, but he didn't look up. "Not Sherrinford Holmes. I'll call him Sherlock Holmes." He finally lifted his head and looked straight in my eyes. His eyes landed on me with what I realized was a fervent gaze. It was an absurd scene: He looked at me indisputably, incontestably, as if we were destined to meet.

"A chemist, working in the lab. Arms eroded by acid for years, just because of his obsession of experiments bordering on morbidity." He talked of incredible yet true facts, his tone rapid and excited. His thinking was almost as fast as mine; I could even say that he was observing me using my own methods. "Loves cigarettes. Lives in solitude. Addicted to the thrills of cocaine and crimes. The most secluded and peculiar soul in the United Kingdom, absolutely."

I extended my hand to him, which he should have taken.

"And, by the way, a horrible, remarkable violinist." Instead, he just smiled genuinely, "And I think, also the one and only consulting detective in London."

Although I had never believed gypsies in the streets who claim to see the past and future of complete strangers in a crystal ball, I could not help but feel utterly fascinated by the miracle in front of my eye--and then, it occurred to me with a tint of sadness, that I would like this man to genuinely appear in my life rather than merely existing in the fleeting ecstasy produced by cocaine.

I deemed myself entitled to read his scripts—since all evidence pointed to the pervading correlations between his words and his writing. Moreover, the fact that he had spoken as if he had fancied me when he himself was but a hallucination created by my brain had left me slightly irritated.

"Sir, can I humbly take it that you are a writer?" I asked, surprised by myself.

"Of course." He said, "I will create an extraordinary adventure of a truly brilliant person, a story that outmatches Poe and amazes the whole Europe. And perhaps by then," his voice suddenly quivered, "perhaps by then, I wouldn’t be this lonely."


End file.
